Prison and the Poverty Trap

This article points to a real problem in our society but the scope of it is much larger than just African-Americans or just drug-related crimes.

I know because many of the kids I grew up with (including one very close family member of mine) were convicted of felonies and sentenced to anywhere from 1.5 to 12 years in a federal penitentiary. Of the 9-or-10-some-odd kids I know who did time, less than half of them have gone on to lead normal, productive lives. Many of them are back in prison now. Bureau of Justice Statistics back up my experience. If you are a male between the ages of 14 and 17 who is convicted of a violent felony, your chances of getting re-arrested are better than 80% [1].

So, why is this? Well, in my opinion, based on countless conversations I've had with these individuals and others, it's practically unfathomable that any of them actually succeed in going "straight".

It's not rocket science. Imagine you're 17 years old. You've been hanging out with the wrong crowd, doing drugs, getting into trouble, and leading a scumbag lifestyle since you were 15 or 16. You get charged with a violent felony, tried as an adult, convicted, and sentenced to 5 years in a maximum security prison (where you get to meet and hang out with a plethora of other gang bangers, drug dealers, rapists, and murderers).

Now picture this. You make parole after 3 years. You're 20. You've got no high school diploma, no college credits, no work experience, no car, no money, and the only friends you had who aren't currently either 1) in jail or 2) about to be in jail are juniors and seniors in college and probably studying abroad in Asia or something while you're living at home trying to figure out what to do with your life. 3 of the most formative years of your young adult life have essentially been obliterated.

What are you going to do? After striking out at 5 or 6 other local establishments, McDonald's just became the latest to turn down your application (you have to tell them if you've been convicted of a felony and if you don't they'll find out when they do the background check). You might have earned your GED while you were in prison but the prospect of getting that pre-law degree you sorta once dreamed is looking pretty slim. What would be the point, anyway? You're not allowed to pass the bar exam. Maybe you should join the military. Oh, wait... they don't want scumbags like you carrying around an assault rifle.

Remember your codefendants? One of them lives right downstairs. He wants to know if you feel like "chilling" later. He just got an ounce of cocaine from one of his buddies and there's still a ton of beer left over from that party he had last night. Fuck it, you're not getting anything done in the next 24 hours, anyway. You're bored. You might be embarrassed to admit it, but you're lonely. Might as well crack open a cold one and try to forget your problems for a spell...

See, when you get convicted and sentenced, you may only serve 15 months in prison but you will be a felon for the rest of your life. And if you got arrested in high school then you don't have any "former life" to go back to. You are not educated. You have no friends. You are not hire-able. You do not have the right to vote. You cannot serve in our military. They're practically begging you to fuck up again.

And, unfortunately, most of them do.

[1] http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/rpr94.pdf

I honestly don't see the point in any prison sentences more than 5 years but less than life. There are many people who have done terrible things and deserve to be in prison forever, and for them I understand a life sentence. For everyone else, when is 5 years not enough? 5 years is a very, very long time and if we actually made an effort to rehabilitate you could teach a person a ton in 5 years. I think that for 90% of crimes criminals should be locked up for no more than 5 years and then placed on probation with mandatory psychological evaluation after that. If they are well-behaved and pass basic psychological tests, they have likely learned their lesson. The only reason I can see for longer non-life sentences is for people who serve multiple years and then become repeat offenders, they may lack the ability to be rehabilitated in a reasonable amount of time.

I wonder what part of this problem is closely related to drugs; if you decriminalized or legalized drugs, would people going to jail for street gang drug dealing move on to other crime (extortion? gambling? prostitution? robbery?), or would they move on to legal activities? Drugs are uniquely profitable (extortion, robbery, etc. have direct victims who will fight back, and I don't think the desire to gamble illegally is anywhere near as widespread or powerful as the desire to do drugs), so I can't really see criminal activities replacing all of the drug trade.

> The shift to tougher penal policies three decades ago was originally credited with helping people in poor neighborhoods by reducing crime. But now that America’s incarceration rate has risen to be the world’s highest

But the crime rate has been steadily decreasing since then. Oh, except for the bump related to the "crack epidemic." Which is exactly what the guy was dealing.

> they don’t see what good was accomplished by keeping him there for two decades

Keeping him away from law-abiding citizens for two decades was accomplished.

Don't get me wrong. It is a sad story. And I sympathize with someone who didn't see a better way for himself than crack dealing but what about all those other people, the society at large, who don't want to be afraid to walk after dark, don't want their property vandalized...?

I found the tipping point part interesting. Where up to a particular point, incarceration is good for a community, but past that point, it hurts the community. It made me wonder if it were possible to identify where that tipping point is, perhaps as a function of incarcerated criminals per capita for a geographic region or something. And then relaxing sentences according to that function.

There is something else.

If you're in this position, you know full well that the odds of ever escaping from the trap are heavily against you. So the question comes up, why try?

Why sacrifice what little you now have and pit yourself against years of hardship to build yourself to a point where you will still be 10 to 20 years behind those with the privilege of being born into wealthier and more stable families?

Unfortunately the answer I saw time and again in others, was that there is no value in trying.

And my experience with growing up in poverty, sleeping rough, working without education (I thankfully never went to prison even though members of my family did)... is precisely that whilst I succeeded in breaking the cycle of poverty that disadvantage creates, I am indeed 10 to 20 years behind my peers who were born into a better situation.

People born into privilege (white, male, Western, middle-class, stable extended family) are born at the top of the mountain. Those born without privilege have a mountain to climb. Those born into disadvantage have an ocean to swim just to find the mountain and will get lost along the way.

I'm a big believer in giving people a chance. You will never see such determination and resourcefulness in people like you will in someone who has come from a dark place and will pit everything they are to make sure that they never return to that dark place. And even at the base of the mountain, you will never find people who will help lift others like those who have already struggled to get there.

It's a real blight on the Western world that we collectively abandon and condemn so many able and smart people who want to do better.

I think that what happened in US is what happens when society persistently refuses to take responsibility for the people that are worth so little on the job market that they can't provide for themselves and their families.

Number of such people are growing because of automation. You have nothing to do for them valuable enough. You are refusing to give them money when the don't do anything so they turn to last profitable things they can do. Those things are illegal. Now you can lock them up and finally have an excuse to give them money (mostly in form of food and shelter and bit of security) for nothing. As additional benefit you can now have an excuse to use tax money hire bunch of people (who are also pretty close to not being able do anything valuable) to watch and re-catch the ones you've locked up.

Root cause IMHO is the stubborn insistence on the rule that you have to work to provide for basic necessities and that people won't work if they are not scared of loosing food and shelter. Meanwhile only 0.01% of all the work done is still done by people. The rest is done by the machines. We don't have 99.99% unemployment rate only because the amount of work we do increased roughly 10000-fold. But it's not exactly that and there's no reason it should be. We have lot of coping mechanisms, like prisons, government inventing new rules and hiring new officers to enforce those rules, corporate jobs that consists mostly of keeping your head low and making friends so you don't get kicked out, unemployment benefits. Huge number of people takes money for nothing already but no one wants to be honest about it. Even if you are sure you don't then you still do because part of the money you should be paying for your food is paid by the government in form of subsidies for farmers. If you are living in European country you were likely given lots of free education and some free health services.

One week inside for a first timer is, I am told, the optimum time. That first week is so disorientating and upsetting that "I won't go back" is the strongest motivator. After a month people settle to the routine and six months are adapted.

YMMV but deterrence and prison have long been as effective e alone in crime reduction. The US is ahead of the field in long term incarceration but you are just leading a pack all travelling in the same direction

Reason #X:

Once in prison, good luck getting a job, even if you manage to overcome what happened inside. Looks like the entire society is designed to look for the tiniest infraction and punish you for it--for life.

Companies which purvey deadly substances like tobacco or hard liquor are listed on stock exchanges and contribute to federal political campaigns. He, with a junky educational system and disappearing blue collar jobs sells marijuana or cocaine and becomes an evil "drug dealer". It's also rather interesting how cocaine and heroin got into the hands of domestic drug distributors like Ricky Ross - something covered by the press from time to time, but not dwelled on.

Was there a poverty trap in feudal Europe, or these American lands before the Americans? There's a poverty trap because the economic system needs a poverty trap to function. It is not due to neglect, but due to a massive amount of attention that poverty exists in the U.S. - it takes a lot of work and effort to keep people poor, in a country where GDP and productivity have been rising for a long time.

What would the reason for U.S. poverty? Well it could be the legacy of the New Deal and progressivism, although that would not explain massive poverty in slums and rural areas at the end of the 19th century in the U.S. It could be due to a liberal idea of a lack of caring - although the New Deal, the Great Society and so forth brought a lot of focus on these things.

Or poverty can exist because it is a necessity, a cornerstone of the economic system. The reserve army of labor ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour ) and all of that.